June 30, 2026 • 46 mins
When a crush of football fans killed 97 people in England in 1989, police and officials engaged in a massive cover-up to blame it on drunken fans. Today we tell that story.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and it's just us and that's okay. And this
is our ongoing Studies Abroad ped issue.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
That's right, and we you know, this is about the
Hillsborough disaster, which was the very unfortunate and super sad
and somewhat infuriating, deadly crush that happened at an English
football stadium in nineteen eighty nine. So we enlisted Kyle,
our one writer from the UK, to put this together
(00:46):
for us, and he did a great job and used
all the appropriate letters and terminology and his spelling and stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
You know, yeah, I was gonna say no z's throughout.
They were all s's.
Speaker 4 (00:57):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
He did a wonderful job this summarizing like a really
big giant story that had we done this episode like
when we first started, it would have been totally different
because around twenty fifteen, the public opinion, the entire basically
worldview of what happened at the strategedy completely flip flopped
(01:21):
and the truth finally came out. We'll get to all that,
but I'd say we kind of give everybody some background
about what's going on here. The whole thing took place,
like you said, in nineteen eighty nine at Hillsborough Stadium.
That's in Sheffield, which is in South Yorkshire, which is
a county in Yorkshire, And normally this is the home
of Sheffield Wednesday Football Club. That's where they play at Hillsboro,
(01:45):
but this day it was actually hosting an FA Cup semifinal.
That means it was all England teams and it was
between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest. So far, so good. This
is just a normal Cup semifinal game that's a big deal,
way bigger than the average Sheffield Wednesday Football club game.
But you know, so far it's pretty normal.
Speaker 3 (02:06):
Yeah, for sure, they had Liverpool had more fans and
I'm not sure how it is now, but nineteen eighty
nine at least that was the case. I think it
probably still is. But they were allocated the smaller end
of the stadium and the entrance and you know, as
you'll a lot of times with disasters like these, you're
(02:27):
going to see it like a series of steps that
happened to kind of ensure unwittingly that something terrible goes down,
and this was sort of the first one was they
allocated the larger fan base the smaller end of the stadium,
and the entrance to that was at the end of
Lepping's Lane, which was a street that dead ended into
(02:48):
the stadium, and not only did it dead end, but
it bottlenecks. It got more narrow as you got toward
that dead end, and that the turnstiles there, which is
where you get in at that part of the stadium.
There were seven of them. They were old, you know,
this is an older stadium, and they didn't you know,
they just couldn't move people through as quickly as like
(03:11):
you would be able to today exactly.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
And you know, under a normal game for Sheffield Wednesday,
this was not that big of a problem. This was
a very big problem this day because there were ten
one hundred fans who were just the ones who had
standing room only tickets in what are called pens. Right,
So they're ultimately like basically little terraces with a bunch
(03:35):
of little tiny steps on them and some railings which
are called crush barriers, and you just stand in them.
You just pack everybody in. But they're supposed to say like, okay,
there're no more than this many people can go into
this pen, no more than this many people can go
into that pen.
Speaker 4 (03:51):
Whatever.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
So there's ten thousand people who are all going into
these pens. They have to use these seven turnstyles so
very quickly. Even outside of this stadium, a bit of
a crush starts to happen, in part because the cops
aren't doing anything about having people form a line or q.
They're not directing anybody to do anything. It's just get
(04:14):
in where you fit in, and whoever gets there first
is the one who gets through that turnstile that moment.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
Yeah, but you know, there's plenty of surveillance footage and
stuff out and it was not you know, as we'll
see the story that was kind of cooked up to
evade I guess being responsible for this, which is what
they were, was that, you know, it was an unruly
crowd of drunks. Hooliganism was a thing much more back then.
(04:41):
They've basically eradicated that now for the most part. And
if you look at the footage, it's you know, it's
a bunch of kids, a lot of teenagers. It wasn't
super expensive back then to get into soccer and football
games like this. It was six pounds to get in
for standing room only, and they were lively. They were
have a good time, but it didn't look like anything
(05:03):
threatening at that point at all. There were people just like,
you know, kind of trying to get into the stadium
to see a game. They were excited about.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
Yeah and all. This really kind of starts about ten
minutes before kickoff. That's when people are like, come on,
let's go, we got to get in. And like by
this time that crowd had backed like the lines or
whatever had backed up into Leppings Lane pretty far. So
people wanted to hurry up and get through right, But
like you said, everybody was generally good natured. Kickoff was
set at three pm, and at ten till three pm
(05:32):
there were still five thousand Liverpool fans who were outside
on Lepping's Lane trying to get through these seven turnstyles.
And so at this point the cops, at least one cop.
The guy who was in charge of managing this side
of the outside of the stadium, got in touch with
the guy who was running all of the police for
(05:54):
this soccer match. His name is David Duckinfield, and the
guy outside said, hey, we need to open a gate
and forget the turnstiles and tickets. There's a bunch of
people who are about to get crushed out here, and
we need to relieve some of this pressure. Please open
this gate. You did that once, Duck and Field ignored it,
did it twice, Duck and Field ignored it. The third time.
It was almost frantic, and Duck and Field finally said, okay,
(06:18):
go ahead and open gate. See they did that at
two point fifty two pm and all of a sudden,
just an enormous mass of people stream into essentially the
foyer of the stadium. So now you go from a
crowd crush outside of the stadium to the potential crowd
crush just inside the stadium.
Speaker 3 (06:35):
Yeah, and so, and we'll get to more about David Duckinfield,
the match commander, and his qualifications and stuff, I guess
in a minute. But one thing we did not mention
is these pins. And this was partially to kind of
keep hooliganism down. They were fenced within the seating area,
(06:57):
so once you got to this large standing there were
different numbered pins within that that were you know, fenced
off from each other. So there were literal pins and
when people started flowing through when they opened gate, sea.
They were all passing through towards this, you know, the
central part of the field, down this long tunnel. I
(07:17):
think Kyle said it was twenty three meters long to
get to pins three and four, which were basically midfield,
and there was plenty of room on the pins on
the outside. But because nobody was directing traffic, nobody was
relaying information, no one knew this, and those central pins
were already full at ten till when that big crowd
(07:38):
of people started to make their way to that spot.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
Right. So again, because I was standing room ontely, it
didn't tell you what pen you had to go to.
You could go to whatever pen. But since that tunnel
was straight ahead, that's where people naturally went. And like
you said, those pins were already full. So as this
tunnel this crush of people, there's crowd of people after
opening gate, sea floods in connects with the people who
are all already coming through those seven turnstyles. Almost all
(08:04):
of them start to go through this tunnel, and that
tunnel opens up on two pens that are already full
of people, way over capacity already. As they found in retrospect,
there was about a thousand more people that they allowed
onto each pen than they should have based on the
kind of crowd control safety stuff they had in place.
So it was already dangerously full before those people from
(08:27):
Gate Sea even made their way down the tunnel. But
when they did, they encountered this mass of other people.
But there were people behind them who didn't know this,
at the back of the tunnel, in the tunnel, and
they all wanted in two so everybody was pressing forward
and then all of a sudden a crowd crush happened
in those two middle pens.
Speaker 4 (08:46):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (08:47):
So it's about five till kickoff. At this point when
people like later described just sort of a change in
how things were going, you know, like I said, it
was it was people generally happy to go see this
soccer game. And by two fifty five it becomes clear
that like something's wrong. Four minutes later it was a
(09:09):
lethal crush had developed and those two central pins and officers,
some of them are telling people to move back like
this is part of the problem is the officers themselves
were very disorganized and not sharing information. So some officers
are telling people to move back. They're saying they can't
move back because there's people behind them and those fences
(09:30):
that were installed to I think that was in nineteen
seventy seven to prevent the hooliganism. We're keeping people like
once they got in from being like, oh wow, it's
getting like super crowded, let's move to these outer pins
where there's plenty of room. People started climbing fences and stuff,
and this is where it gets really really out of hand,
like the panic starts to set in. People are trying
to drag people over the fences to safety. Some of
(09:53):
the gates of the pins were opened by the cops
at that point, but it's developed into like a real dangerous.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Right, And so inside the pens there's those railings that
they're kind of like intermittently staggered in the pens, right,
So if you walk into one of these pens and
you're facing the field, you'll eventually come to a railing,
and that's a crowd barrier or a crush barrier, which
means that if a crush develops, that barrier is supposed
to stop it from going any further than the barrier.
(10:21):
So the people behind the barrier, life's gonna suck for them,
but the people in front of that barrier will be safe. Right,
it's like limiting crowd crushes. Well, the problem is one
of them was very very old, at least one, and
it gave So there's a whole crush of people who
are pressed up against this and a whole bunch of
people on the other side of it too, And now
(10:42):
one of those barriers fall and that crush of people
just basically spills into this other group of people in
the same pen and people it just fell over. It
was like a wave of people that overcame the people
who were standing on the other side of that barrier
that broke.
Speaker 3 (10:57):
Yeah, so all this time the match starts on time,
word is not again. Communication was just kind of chaotic,
and no one got word down to the pitch that hey,
maybe we should delay this game and get this under control.
And at three pm the game starts at three oh five,
(11:17):
those barriers, at least the one in Pen three, had
given away, and a human cascade starts. And this is when,
you know, the devastating stuff. We're not going to read
one thousand accounts of people getting you know, squeezed to death,
because it's pretty awful, but you know what happens in
(11:37):
a situation like that is you can't breathe because you're
so packed into one another that you can't expand your
chest out to get a breath, and you generally die
of asphyxiation or like your heart stops right.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Yeah, and this happened to a lot of people in
this We talked a lot about this phenomenon in the
Crowd episode and I think in the Black Friday episode two.
Speaker 3 (12:03):
Yeah, the Crowd one was what inspired this episode.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
Yeah, because we we just touched on it just a
little bit, right.
Speaker 3 (12:10):
I don't even know if I mean, I think if
we mentioned it. I said, I brought it up because
I had asked Kyle to write this.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
Gotcha, gotcha? Okay, But when there was like when this crowd,
this human cascade happened, people got pushed over, and you know,
there's a natural human reaction to try to get upright again,
which means that you were standing on people beneath you,
and so people got trampled. In addition to the people
who were pressed up against the other crush barriers or
against the fence. There's some really disturbing photos that were
(12:40):
taken very close up of the people pressed up against
the fence. Did you see those.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
I saw them when I was in high school and
sports illustrated, Like, I remember this vividly. I didn't go
back and revisit a lot of that because it's super upsetting.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Yeah, it really is upsiding. And there's a guy who
took a lot of His name was David Cannon, and
he was at least partially responsible for getting the police
to finally stop the game. The reason why they wanted
to stop the game so bad is because they think
that that that crush or that movement that caused the
human cascade was in response to one of Liverpool's players
(13:16):
just missing a goal, and so they're like, we need
to stop the game, right, So this guy, David Cannon,
got them to stop the game, or at least he tried.
He's one of the main photographers who was there at
the time, so his pictures are like you said, it's
very disturbing to see this because you can hear people
describe it, you can read descriptions of it, but when
(13:37):
you see the people pressed up against the fence like
they were, it really comes home how horrific this was.
Like you can kind of finally start to imagine yourself
in that position.
Speaker 3 (13:48):
Yeah, it's yeah, it's pretty bad. That's why I didn't
go back and look at three oh six. It was
a superintendent who actually got the game stopped. He went
down to the pitch and actually went to the referee.
They had a couple of minutes before signaled to the
police control box to stop, but it kept on for
two more minutes. So that's when the superintendent finally like
literally went on the field and told the referee, like,
(14:11):
you got to stop this game. This isn't because you know,
everyone thought it was just like rowdy fans, and he
was like, no, that this is not what's happening. The
match commander Duckinfield requested more cops to come. It was
called Operation Support, and no one was explaining why or
what's going on though, So once the officers and you know,
(14:32):
communications are not what they are now. Certainly it's not
an excuse, but they were not getting briefed on exactly
what was going on. So a lot of the cops
there assumed that the fans were just rowdy and we're
trying to like storm the fence, to storm the field,
and they formed a cordon on the pitch to kind
(14:54):
of keep that from happening. And again some of them
are opening gates, like they see what's going on and
are some or trying to help the fans, but other
cops are either ignoring them or like shoving people back in.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
Right or standing there facing this crowd crush in a
line according with other cops. So imagine that, like just
how surreal that would look because they didn't understand what
was going on. So eventually they managed to open some
gates which allowed the crowd crush to ease up. And
so the crowd crush was bad enough, like the after
(15:29):
effects like immediate after effects, or it just continued to
go badly. The police response, the emergency response was just
so uncoordinated that it surely I think they proved it
cost the lives of scores of people. I think in
the end, ninety five people died, seven hundred were injured.
(15:53):
Two more people died years later. So really ninety seven
people died from this crowd crush.
Speaker 3 (15:58):
Yeah, thirty seven people were teenagers, twenty seven were parents.
There was one ten year old that died. He was
very ironically, I guess, and sadly the cousin of Steven Gerard,
who was became a big star for England in their
soccer team, but I think the oldest I think that
(16:19):
was the youngest at ten and the oldest was a
sixty seven year old whose brother was playing for Liverpool.
And it's yeah again you know to read through like
each account is a little too depressing for this show.
But you did mention the two that died years later.
I think Tony Bland died four years after in nineteen
ninety three. He had brain damage up into that point
(16:40):
and then what they count as the ninety seventh victim
didn't pass away until twenty twenty one, but they said
it was due to you know, these life changing injuries
that he suffered from this.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
Yeah, I think also brain damage as well. Andrew Devine,
So there were there was like an immediate response to this,
right spite what we'll see Liverpool just taking all of
the blame for this, Liverpool fans, there was like a
public response. One of the things was Paul McCartney jumped
(17:12):
in because this is a Liverpool team and he's from Liverpool.
I don't know if you knew they're not Chuck, but he,
I guess released a charity single cover of fairy Cross
the Mercy.
Speaker 4 (17:24):
Have you heard that song?
Speaker 2 (17:25):
It's a good song.
Speaker 3 (17:27):
I didn't think it was a great but I think
it was a great act.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
Did you listen to the I didn't listen to the
eighty nine one that they released for as a charity single.
Did you listen to the original, because that's very good?
Speaker 3 (17:39):
Oh? No, I listened to the one that pertained to
the show.
Speaker 2 (17:42):
Okay, Well, at any rate, it's a good song originally,
and it was, like you said, a very cool act.
There were also tons like you can also see photos
of just the the whole entire soccer pitch covered with flowers,
just as in Memoriam. It was just there was a
there was a good public response, but ultimately public opinion
(18:05):
was much more venomous.
Speaker 3 (18:08):
Yeah, I guess that's probably a good time for a break,
and we'll come back and talk about that venom right
up for this, all right, So, right after this, the
(18:37):
police basically immediately started trying to engage in successfully as
we'll see for a while, engaged in a cover up.
They wanted to, you know, not be on the hook
for this, and the hooliganism that I talked about had
been blamed. I thought we had done an episode on hooliganism,
but I don't think we ever did, did we?
Speaker 2 (18:57):
No? Surely we talked about it in our soccer episode,
but I don't think we ever did one just on that.
Speaker 3 (19:01):
Yeah, it was on the list for a while, but
maybe we should wait in case things change again. Okay,
but that was the narrative that was fed the public
basically that match commander, and I guess we should go
ahead and talk about David Duckinfield a little bit. He's
the one that first started saying was that gate was
forced open by Liverpool fans, Like he denied even opening
(19:22):
that gate. This guy was not qualified for this job.
I think previous commanders did things like go down before
the game, like hours before, check things out, walk around,
identify choke points or potential hazards, because this had happened
a couple of times before, one time in this very stadium,
(19:43):
I think in nineteen eighty one, and so it was
top of mind or should have been, and he did
not do that. He never actually inspected the grounds beforehand,
and he kind of went missing from about noon to
two o'clock on the day, never accounted for his whereabouts.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
Yeah, he had never commanded a match at the stadium,
let alone a semi final match. Just even a regular match.
He'd never commanded it, so he had no idea what
he was doing. He was also a very arrogant person,
so he felt like he could just do it naturally.
He didn't need to familiarize himself. And he had served
(20:22):
as a rank and file patrolman or PC like ten
years before. That was the last time he'd worked a match,
and he was definitely not in charge of it. So
he was very much out of his league and like
it took him decades to finally acknowledge that. Instead, he
(20:45):
helped lead this police cover up that shifted all the
blame unfairly and untruthfully toward the fans for Liverpool and
off of the cops who were really responsible for the tragedy.
Speaker 3 (20:57):
Yeah, for sure. So we'll get to kind of what
happened in a timeline since as this goes on in
a minute, But initially the police watchdog recommended that there
was like a disciplinary case would be brought against Duckinfield.
That did not happen at the time, and he was
medically retired two years later on full pension, basically to
(21:21):
evade these discipline from this incident. The case again that
the cops built was that people were drunk. They got
there late. It was the Liverpool fans, a lot of
them didn't even have tickets and they were trying to
just force their way in. And over the years they
found out that they had gone back in. Even this
(21:43):
is how despicable it gets. Not only did they cook
up this narrative, but they went back in and cooked
the books and altered witness statements and removed comments about
that were unfavorable to the police and how things were handled,
and they torched it basically.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
Yeah, and the force was very regimented, I saw, right.
So there wasn't there wasn't going to be any descent.
There wasn't going to be any secret tip offs to
the press about what really happened by any of the
police constables, you know, under these guys charge, right, So
the top saying this is what happened. That's what everybody
on the police force was going to say, what happened.
(22:22):
And so that's what the media heard. And the British
tabloids typically have like a fairly bad reputation, and they
really showed up for it for this one. The whole
idea that the soccer fans, especially the Liverpool fans in
particular were responsible for this. Would they just beat that
(22:47):
drum incessantly? They called the fans and by extension the
victims beasts yobs, which means thugs, vile. And then The
Sun printed a front page article called The Truth I
think within a day or two after this that really
drove this home, like just how despicable the tabloids could
(23:09):
get about this stuff.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
Yeah, they said things like there were fans that were
urinating on cops, that they were looting the dead at
the time, and this was not the case. And The
Sun ended up apologizing in twenty twelve and has been
boycotted in Liverpool ever since. I still don't think they'd
sell the Sun there good, even after the apologies. But
(23:34):
this was, you know, this was the nineteen eighties and
things were different back then. The hooliganism was, you know,
much more prominent. So it was a narrative which was
easy for people to believe in England, and when they
were reading it, they you know, people were like, yeah,
this is the typical sort of anti social underclass is
(23:54):
how Kyle put it. They're trying to get in without tickets,
you know, drunk it through in the afternoon, it was
a different kind of It was a different sport back
then in a lot of ways, as far as you know,
as we'll see the kind of money that poured into
the sport in the nineteen nineties after this, certainly with
the start of the Premier League in nineteen ninety two
(24:16):
and ticket prices rising and stadiums modernizing and just big
money and big business. It just it was a lot
more just kind of small time and old school and
quaint back then, and so people were ready to accept
this narrative, you know, kind of as it was being
fed to them.
Speaker 2 (24:35):
Yeah, Britain has a classist streak running through it and
this certainly fit that idea, that supposition that lower classes
were drunk and violent, and of course they were responsible
for this, right, But so the public accepted this. The
Thatcher government obviously was totally down with this idea, and
(24:56):
that's just how it went. Like that was it, as
far as everybody was concerned. Thanks to the police reports,
thanks to the government stance, thanks to what the media
was saying. What happened was a bunch of drunk Liverpool
fans who didn't have tickets storm the gate and ninety
seven people ended up dying as a result. Shame on
(25:17):
Liverpool and its fans. That was the public opinion on
this for years.
Speaker 3 (25:23):
That's right. So in nineteen ninety we get our first
independent report. It was called the Tailor Report for Lord
Justice Taylor, and they, I mean, this was kind of
right after and they did come out blaming the police
failure to control the crowd first off, and Duckinfield specifically
(25:45):
for failing to close this tunnel. Like if they e
would have closed that tunnel and it would have fed
people to the empty pins, and that could that probably
would have avoided this whole thing, despite like having way
too many people down there. If they would have been
fed to those empty your pens, this probably wouldn't have happened. Sure,
and he made you know, safety recommendations in the final report,
(26:06):
but very key, it didn't have anything in there about
like like hey, these people were all just victims and
they had no part in sort of making this happen.
That didn't. That didn't come along until much later.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
No, for sure, that closing that tunnel too, or his
failure to close the tunnel two is even worse than
it seems because that was actually such a widely used
technique for police superintendents who were in charge of overseeing
matches over the years that one of them had his
name on. It was called the Freeman tactic. And it
(26:41):
was as simple as closing that middle tunnel and opening
the entrances to the less the less full pens. And
so that just shows you how little of a grasp
Duckinfield had on the concept of safety at a football
match that he was responsible for overseeing. He didn't even
know about the Freeman if you ask me. And like
(27:02):
rank and file cops who worked matches before knew about
the Freeman tactic. It was like that was a huge
deal in addition to all the people dying as a
result that the fact that like everyone knew that you
should do that and Duck and Field didn't is a
big deal.
Speaker 3 (27:16):
Yeah, for sure. And a year later, after the Taylor
Independent Report, the Tailor Report, these inquests are coming back
with verdicts. Accidental death is basically what they all were,
you know, decided upon, and it was very controversial. Obviously,
the victims' families are and they're the ones you know
(27:38):
who kept us alive all these years until they, you know,
finally got some measure of accountability. I guess the coroner
ruled out evidence relating to death anything after three pm.
He ruled out evidence because he said everybody was either
dead or brain dead by three point fifteen, and there
were there was like actual proof that would come out
(27:59):
later that some people survived until four pm, and a
lot of people would have survived for that forty five
minutes had they gotten emergency services in there in an
orderly manner.
Speaker 2 (28:10):
Right Yeah, those are the people I was talking about earlier.
So that coroner essentially was just basically going along with
the sentiment, the public sentiment that these people surely it
wasn't the police who were responsible, right Yeah. In addition
though to being disorganized, they were also like really cruel
to the families, And this stuff came out in these reports,
(28:32):
including the Hip report in the trials that like, if
you were a victim family member, you were sent to
a gym, a nearby gym that had been turned into
a morgue, and the first thing that you encountered was
standing out waiting outside in the cold before they led
you in and handed you a stack of polaroids of
(28:53):
the victim's dead bodies.
Speaker 3 (28:55):
Right yeah, I mean they had to look through those
who identify their own. It was pretty brutal.
Speaker 2 (29:01):
But it wasn't even like are you looking for a child?
Are you looking for a man? And they were sorted.
It was like, here's the stack of polaroids, look through
hi until you find your loved one. The parents of
the children who died, they weren't allowed to hold or
kiss them because they were told that they were property
of the coroner. And the coroner himself seems to have
been on the cover up to some degree, tangentially, because
(29:25):
he ordered that all of the deceased, including the children,
have their blood drawn to be tested for alcohol content
to support this police narrative. Well, what turned out, what
he did inadvertently was show that alcohol was not a
factor in this really, Like there were very few drunk people,
and the ones that were drunk weren't all that drunk.
Speaker 3 (29:46):
Yeah, I mean, in a weird way, it's good that
he did that, you know.
Speaker 4 (29:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
So, like you said, the families of the victims organized
and tried to keep this thing alive and you know,
keep the public from solidifying their about what had happened,
and they managed to get a private prosecution I guess
laid or charged against the police for this for the incident.
Didn't know you could do that. Apparently you can still
(30:13):
in the UK, America some other places. But a private
group of people can get a court to prosecute people,
and that's what they did. And this found that duck
and Field, they couldn't reach a verdict on him, whether
he was criminally responsible or not. One of his deputies
was acquitted and the judge in this case said, that's it.
(30:33):
Duck and Field will never face another a retrial like
this is it. He's not responsible, even though we failed
to reach a verdict, which is a weird thing to do.
But that happened in two thousand.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
Yeah, charges against Sheffield the actual football club that wasn't
even playing that day, but he played in that stadium
Sheffield Wednesday, and the Sheffield City Council and the safety
engineers the Eastwoods were ruled out. And this was I
think years earlier, so they were already off the hook.
So that was all in two thousand. Twelve years later,
(31:06):
in twenty twelve, there was another report that the Hip Report,
the Hillsboro Independent Panel, and that brought about some new
inquests more sort of digging into this thing about like
what happened with the police, And this is the one
that really started to kind of turn the tide as
far as the public goes. And one of the reasons
(31:27):
it happened was because MP Andy Burnham was at a
twenty year memorial service and was just lambasted by the
crowd people chanting justice for the ninety six. Really had
a hard time at that event. So he's the one
that was like, let's open this back up four hundred
and fifty thousand pages of information, and this is when
(31:50):
they really kind of started to make things right.
Speaker 2 (31:53):
Yeah, that panel apparently kept like releasing information piecemeal and
the press is kept reporting on it, and very quickly
the public was like, oh wait, we've been wrong. It
wasn't these drunken Liverpool fans. They were mistreated. The families
of the victims were mistreated, survivors were mistreated. It was
actually these cops, and the cops had lied to essentially
(32:14):
cover up their responsibility. Like the public opinion just completely shifted,
and so that hip report led to new inquests, and
the inquests found that the ninety six victims and later
on the ninety seventh victim were all unlawfully killed. So
it wasn't accidental anymore. Like the first inquest found they
(32:37):
were unlawfully killed, which meant someone is criminally accountable for
their deaths, right, And this inquest said go figure it out,
like this is our we're saying, we're recommending that somebody
is responsible for this.
Speaker 3 (32:51):
Yeah. It also found that forty one I was looking
for the number earlier, but forty one of the ninety
six who died, they said, quote had potential to survive
if the you know, rescue had been a little more organized,
because I don't think we said the first ambulance arrived
on the scene at three sixteen, and even when the
ambulances had been called, they didn't know the severity of
(33:13):
the situation because they I think one cop called for
like a big, you know, mass of ambulances to come,
but it wasn't described what was happening, so they refused
that initial. The medical services refused that initial like huge
rush of ambulances and just sent like some They also
didn't set up patriage on the field like you know,
(33:33):
we'll get to that in a little more detail. But
forty one of the ninety six would have survived, they determined,
which is just a brutal number.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
Yeah, in twenty nineteen, after all this stuff had come out,
public opinion changed, Duckingfield was dragged back into court. Remember
that one judge had been like, he can't face a retrial. Well,
they were like, well, circumstances have changed enough now that
he's definitely going to be tried again. And he was
(34:01):
found not guilty of gross negligence manslaughter. And then they
also heard evidence about the altering of the police reports
to make it favorable for the cops and make it
unfavorable for the Liverpool fans, and those guys got off too.
So now we have a place where the inquest, the
government inquest, is saying these people are unlawfully killed, so
(34:24):
someone's criminally responsible, and the courts are saying the people
who are responsible are not criminally responsible, So nobody is
liable anymore. Nobody's responsible officially.
Speaker 3 (34:35):
Yeah. And then the final well, who knows it's a
final report because they seem to still be happening. But
last year, in twenty twenty five, an Independent Office for
Police Conduct report came out and basically reiterated that nobody
was going to be held like, actually held responsible. You know,
(34:56):
they it wasn't as cold hearted as it sounds, they
were basically saying like, hey, this is thirty six years later.
All twelve of these officers are either have either passed
on or have long since retired. And I got the
sense it was like, can we can we put this
all behind us now and not throw these old cops
(35:16):
in jail.
Speaker 2 (35:18):
Essentially, But yeah, I think the families were like, well,
they're still responsible even though they're old. And the reason
that they got old because you took fourteen years to
conduct this investigation.
Speaker 3 (35:27):
Yeah for sure, let's take a break.
Speaker 2 (35:29):
Chuck, and we'll come back and finish up.
Speaker 4 (35:31):
Huh. Yeah, let's do it, okay, Chuck.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
So not just the hip report, but a bunch of
different reports basically showed quite clearly that the police response,
the emergency response was just terrible. And you talked a
lot about what the I guess the cluster with the ambulances,
but the police as well were essentially disorganized about its
disorganized as a group of police can be. And the
(36:15):
reason why is because again David Duckinfield was just out
of his depth through and through even though he was
commanding the match. And I said that he was a
rather arrogant type and he was. But in twenty fifteen,
for the first time in decades, twenty five plus years,
(36:35):
as these reports started coming out and public opinion changed,
when he was tried, eventually he admitted. After seven days
of intense grilling on the stand, he finally basically broke
down and admitted like, yes, he was responsible for the
death of those ninety six people because the ninety seventh
(36:55):
hadn't died yet, and that he froze under pressure. This
is a complete reversal of what he'd been saying the
whole time, Chuck like he'd been saying it was the
Liverpool fans. They were drunk. They were drunk. These guys
have been saying it for decades. Now, all of a sudden,
the guy in charge says, no, I failed and people
died because I was not qualified to command that match.
Speaker 3 (37:15):
Yeah. You know, you hear something like that as a
family member of a victim, and it's I don't know
how that feels, actually, I don't know if that would
provide some solace to finally hear the truth, yeah, or
if it just like re angers you all over again
after all these years.
Speaker 2 (37:29):
Probably both.
Speaker 3 (37:30):
Yeah, I'm sure there's a lot of mixed emotion about it,
but at the very least that finally happened. I mean,
there is something about somebody finally admitting something like and
not just continuing to gaslight the world and the victims themselves,
So I guess that is something. It really changed stadium
safety and security after this, the Taylor Report. They basically said, hey,
(37:54):
no more of these standing room only things. You have
to have seats for everybody that's in there. I think
it was all the clubs in the top two divisions
in nineteen ninety four had to move to that, and
then they established the Ground Sports Ground Safety Authority after that,
you know, to oversee like all of these football stadiums
(38:16):
over there.
Speaker 4 (38:17):
Right.
Speaker 2 (38:17):
Yeah, this was a major turning point, not just in
safety at football matches, but in the game of football
itself because this happened to coincide with England making it
into the semi finals in the World Cup in nineteen
ninety and you know a lot of people who had
been former football fans were now caught up in the
spirit again. So that brought a lot of people back
to being fans of pro football. Those upgrades that the
(38:43):
clubs and the stadiums were required to undertake meant that
they needed to up ticket prices, higher ticket prices, like
you said, kind of change the social strata of fans.
It got more expensive, it got more business like soccer
changed almost directly as a result of the Hillsborough tragedy.
Speaker 3 (39:01):
Yeah, and that, you know, when the Premier League came
on in ninety two, like that was that was a
real game changer. Like the amount of money that is
spent in the Premier League on players, on the teams,
on I think there's the and I'll probably get some
of this wrong because I don't call the Premier League,
but my good friends do all of them almost And
(39:22):
they were talking about the you know, you get relegated
if you don't I guess when, or I guess if
you're in the bottom of whatever category and you don't
make that you don't win that game to stay in
the Premier League, you get relegated down to the lower league.
And so that game to see who gets relegated and
who doesn't is called the most expensive game in sports
(39:44):
or something like that, just because of like all the
money that comes with or that you miss out on
with being relegated or that comes with staying in the
Premier League.
Speaker 2 (39:53):
Yeah, these guys get paid like thousands and thousands of
pounds a year to play, some of them way more
than that.
Speaker 3 (40:00):
That even the first joke of the episode.
Speaker 2 (40:03):
Let's talk about Keir Starmer because he is under fire
right now. That family or the organization of victims Families,
they haven't gone away. They organized and they're still very
vocal and one of the things that they have been
doing is putting pressure on Kere Starmer and his labor
government because he made a direct promise that he would
see through the Hillsborough Law, which would it was pretty
(40:27):
important legislation, or it would be if they get it
passed through.
Speaker 3 (40:31):
Yeah. I think the whole point, it seems to be
of the Hillsborough Law would be to enforce and it's
weird that you have the law to do this, but
to enforce truth when cops are dealing with something like
this and basically like almost like a whistleblower thing like hey,
you can come out and tell the truth, Like you
(40:51):
don't like you're obliged to tell the truth. You don't
have to go along with this narrative that gets passed
down and that loyalty that you were kind of talking
about earlier on I don't I'm that didn't like really
dig into the law. I don't know if they're like
protections or anything involved, but that law was is hasn't
been passed yet, which is really frustrating.
Speaker 2 (41:12):
Right, Yeah, not just cops too, but like any public
official has to tell the truth and when it pertains
to their work, which actually it is sad that you
would need to make a law, but that would be
revolutionary to have a law like that in any country,
you know.
Speaker 3 (41:27):
Yeah. And I think the hang up maybe or one
of the hang ups is I five, And we did
a pretty good episode on that at one point that
I think Kyle helped us with that one too. But
unless I'm reading this wrong, it seems like I five
is hanging it up because they're like, hey, listen, like
we deal in lies and subterfuge, like that's our bag,
(41:47):
so we can't be included in this.
Speaker 4 (41:49):
That is our bag. Baby, That's right.
Speaker 3 (41:52):
I missed it. I missed the baby.
Speaker 2 (41:56):
You got anything else?
Speaker 3 (41:57):
I got nothing else, just to an awful tragedy, like
I said. I remember this was right after spring break
my senior year. I came home and I had been
a regular Sports Illustrated subscriber since I was like nine
years old and this was I think the cover issue
even and that's where I saw those brutal pictures. If
(42:18):
you're into a it's not like super hard to watch
other than you know, it's about the tragedy, but they
don't show like truly truly awful things. There's that twelve
minute documentary from The Guardian that you sent that really
encapsulates it, although there are some body bags and stuff
like that, so I guess there should be a trigger
warning there, Yeah, for sure, But thankfully there weren't. Like,
(42:41):
you know, I didn't see any actual video footage of
the fences and the people, like, I don't know if
that exists.
Speaker 2 (42:49):
Yeah, I don't. Yeah, I don't know either. The photographs
definitely do. I'd be surprised if there wasn't any footage, So, you.
Speaker 3 (42:54):
Know, yeah, I wonder if that photographer won an award
for that work he did.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
You should have, especially if he was one of the
people helping, because you know, so many fans helped, you know,
try to render aid to the people on the field.
One thing we probably should mention that that we didn't
is that in twenty twelve, the United Kingdom government, through
Prime Minister David Cameron at the time, apologized to the
(43:23):
victim's families for the double injustice of the loss of
life and the blame that was put on Liverpool fans.
So at least they had that kernel of something. Yeah, Solace,
maybe Salace, thank you a quantum of it.
Speaker 3 (43:37):
If you want to know more, you're just throwing around
British pop culture references. Who knew that James Bond and
Austin Powers were going to make an appearance.
Speaker 2 (43:44):
I'm going to start on my own sitcom called Suddenly
Angle File, but it's gonna be spelled like that. I
just Mangled Anglo file.
Speaker 3 (43:52):
Yeah, or black Adder, that's another good title.
Speaker 2 (43:55):
Sure, since Chuck made a joke about Blackadder has foretold
in two thousand and eight, it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 3 (44:04):
I'm going to call this. I screwed up on that
Van Go episode about the movie. Hey, guys, just finished
the Visa Bango episode. Want to let you know the
movie with Willem Dafoe is called at Eternity's Gate. This
is something I remember now but I forgot at the time.
You mustn't have seen it. But we're aware of it.
More importantly, you must see Loving Vincent, and I think
(44:25):
that's what I said.
Speaker 4 (44:26):
It was called.
Speaker 3 (44:27):
That's the movie that's animated using sixty five thousand paintings
done in the style of Ago by one hundred Polish painters.
Speaker 2 (44:33):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (44:34):
It's visually amazing and incredibly well done. And the soundtrack
includes the song from Don McClean. I think we talked
about it in the episode of Vincent Storry Storry Night
beautifully compliments the movie highly recommended. My wife and are
huge fans of the show. Have been listening to every
episode since almost the beginning. Keep up the amazing work
(44:54):
and don't let those naysayers who complain about your sidebars.
That's one of the things we enjoy most. And that
is from Brian and Alexis in Bethlehem, PA.
Speaker 2 (45:04):
Nice Thanks Brian and Alexis. We appreciate that, Chuck. Since
you stepped up and took a correction, I feel like
I should admit to one. Okay, in are Lamon's short stuff,
you mean Lamon, that's part of it. The bigger part
is that I said Greece is an island. I even
went back and double checked, and everybody's right. It is
(45:26):
not an island at all.
Speaker 3 (45:28):
I didn't catch you saying that.
Speaker 2 (45:29):
So it's like Germany being landlocked. Now my geography skills
are starting to match up with my math skills.
Speaker 3 (45:36):
I wish I would have caught that, because I remember
very distinctly that you could take a train there.
Speaker 2 (45:41):
Well, in the episode, you said, yeah, yeah, it sure
is an island. I swear to God it's an island.
Speaker 4 (45:46):
Josh, that's right.
Speaker 3 (45:47):
I doubled down verbatim.
Speaker 2 (45:50):
All right, Well, thanks to Brian and Alexis. And if
you want to be like Brian and Alexis, you can
get in touch with this too via email at Stuff.
Speaker 1 (45:59):
Podcast That I Heard, Stuff You Should Know is a
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows. H
Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and it's just us and that's okay. And this
is our ongoing Studies Abroad ped issue.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
That's right, and we you know, this is about the
Hillsborough disaster, which was the very unfortunate and super sad
and somewhat infuriating, deadly crush that happened at an English
football stadium in nineteen eighty nine. So we enlisted Kyle,
our one writer from the UK, to put this together
(00:46):
for us, and he did a great job and used
all the appropriate letters and terminology and his spelling and stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
You know, yeah, I was gonna say no z's throughout.
They were all s's.
Speaker 4 (00:57):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
He did a wonderful job this summarizing like a really
big giant story that had we done this episode like
when we first started, it would have been totally different
because around twenty fifteen, the public opinion, the entire basically
worldview of what happened at the strategedy completely flip flopped
(01:21):
and the truth finally came out. We'll get to all that,
but I'd say we kind of give everybody some background
about what's going on here. The whole thing took place,
like you said, in nineteen eighty nine at Hillsborough Stadium.
That's in Sheffield, which is in South Yorkshire, which is
a county in Yorkshire, And normally this is the home
of Sheffield Wednesday Football Club. That's where they play at Hillsboro,
(01:45):
but this day it was actually hosting an FA Cup semifinal.
That means it was all England teams and it was
between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest. So far, so good. This
is just a normal Cup semifinal game that's a big deal,
way bigger than the average Sheffield Wednesday Football club game.
But you know, so far it's pretty normal.
Speaker 3 (02:06):
Yeah, for sure, they had Liverpool had more fans and
I'm not sure how it is now, but nineteen eighty
nine at least that was the case. I think it
probably still is. But they were allocated the smaller end
of the stadium and the entrance and you know, as
you'll a lot of times with disasters like these, you're
(02:27):
going to see it like a series of steps that
happened to kind of ensure unwittingly that something terrible goes down,
and this was sort of the first one was they
allocated the larger fan base the smaller end of the stadium,
and the entrance to that was at the end of
Lepping's Lane, which was a street that dead ended into
(02:48):
the stadium, and not only did it dead end, but
it bottlenecks. It got more narrow as you got toward
that dead end, and that the turnstiles there, which is
where you get in at that part of the stadium.
There were seven of them. They were old, you know,
this is an older stadium, and they didn't you know,
they just couldn't move people through as quickly as like
(03:11):
you would be able to today exactly.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
And you know, under a normal game for Sheffield Wednesday,
this was not that big of a problem. This was
a very big problem this day because there were ten
one hundred fans who were just the ones who had
standing room only tickets in what are called pens. Right,
So they're ultimately like basically little terraces with a bunch
(03:35):
of little tiny steps on them and some railings which
are called crush barriers, and you just stand in them.
You just pack everybody in. But they're supposed to say like, okay,
there're no more than this many people can go into
this pen, no more than this many people can go
into that pen.
Speaker 4 (03:51):
Whatever.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
So there's ten thousand people who are all going into
these pens. They have to use these seven turnstyles so
very quickly. Even outside of this stadium, a bit of
a crush starts to happen, in part because the cops
aren't doing anything about having people form a line or q.
They're not directing anybody to do anything. It's just get
(04:14):
in where you fit in, and whoever gets there first
is the one who gets through that turnstile that moment.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
Yeah, but you know, there's plenty of surveillance footage and
stuff out and it was not you know, as we'll
see the story that was kind of cooked up to
evade I guess being responsible for this, which is what
they were, was that, you know, it was an unruly
crowd of drunks. Hooliganism was a thing much more back then.
(04:41):
They've basically eradicated that now for the most part. And
if you look at the footage, it's you know, it's
a bunch of kids, a lot of teenagers. It wasn't
super expensive back then to get into soccer and football
games like this. It was six pounds to get in
for standing room only, and they were lively. They were
have a good time, but it didn't look like anything
(05:03):
threatening at that point at all. There were people just like,
you know, kind of trying to get into the stadium
to see a game. They were excited about.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
Yeah and all. This really kind of starts about ten
minutes before kickoff. That's when people are like, come on,
let's go, we got to get in. And like by
this time that crowd had backed like the lines or
whatever had backed up into Leppings Lane pretty far. So
people wanted to hurry up and get through right, But
like you said, everybody was generally good natured. Kickoff was
set at three pm, and at ten till three pm
(05:32):
there were still five thousand Liverpool fans who were outside
on Lepping's Lane trying to get through these seven turnstyles.
And so at this point the cops, at least one cop.
The guy who was in charge of managing this side
of the outside of the stadium, got in touch with
the guy who was running all of the police for
(05:54):
this soccer match. His name is David Duckinfield, and the
guy outside said, hey, we need to open a gate
and forget the turnstiles and tickets. There's a bunch of
people who are about to get crushed out here, and
we need to relieve some of this pressure. Please open
this gate. You did that once, Duck and Field ignored it,
did it twice, Duck and Field ignored it. The third time.
It was almost frantic, and Duck and Field finally said, okay,
(06:18):
go ahead and open gate. See they did that at
two point fifty two pm and all of a sudden,
just an enormous mass of people stream into essentially the
foyer of the stadium. So now you go from a
crowd crush outside of the stadium to the potential crowd
crush just inside the stadium.
Speaker 3 (06:35):
Yeah, and so, and we'll get to more about David Duckinfield,
the match commander, and his qualifications and stuff, I guess
in a minute. But one thing we did not mention
is these pins. And this was partially to kind of
keep hooliganism down. They were fenced within the seating area,
(06:57):
so once you got to this large standing there were
different numbered pins within that that were you know, fenced
off from each other. So there were literal pins and
when people started flowing through when they opened gate, sea.
They were all passing through towards this, you know, the
central part of the field, down this long tunnel. I
(07:17):
think Kyle said it was twenty three meters long to
get to pins three and four, which were basically midfield,
and there was plenty of room on the pins on
the outside. But because nobody was directing traffic, nobody was
relaying information, no one knew this, and those central pins
were already full at ten till when that big crowd
(07:38):
of people started to make their way to that spot.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
Right. So again, because I was standing room ontely, it
didn't tell you what pen you had to go to.
You could go to whatever pen. But since that tunnel
was straight ahead, that's where people naturally went. And like
you said, those pins were already full. So as this
tunnel this crush of people, there's crowd of people after
opening gate, sea floods in connects with the people who
are all already coming through those seven turnstyles. Almost all
(08:04):
of them start to go through this tunnel, and that
tunnel opens up on two pens that are already full
of people, way over capacity already. As they found in retrospect,
there was about a thousand more people that they allowed
onto each pen than they should have based on the
kind of crowd control safety stuff they had in place.
So it was already dangerously full before those people from
(08:27):
Gate Sea even made their way down the tunnel. But
when they did, they encountered this mass of other people.
But there were people behind them who didn't know this,
at the back of the tunnel, in the tunnel, and
they all wanted in two so everybody was pressing forward
and then all of a sudden a crowd crush happened
in those two middle pens.
Speaker 4 (08:46):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (08:47):
So it's about five till kickoff. At this point when
people like later described just sort of a change in
how things were going, you know, like I said, it
was it was people generally happy to go see this
soccer game. And by two fifty five it becomes clear
that like something's wrong. Four minutes later it was a
(09:09):
lethal crush had developed and those two central pins and officers,
some of them are telling people to move back like
this is part of the problem is the officers themselves
were very disorganized and not sharing information. So some officers
are telling people to move back. They're saying they can't
move back because there's people behind them and those fences
(09:30):
that were installed to I think that was in nineteen
seventy seven to prevent the hooliganism. We're keeping people like
once they got in from being like, oh wow, it's
getting like super crowded, let's move to these outer pins
where there's plenty of room. People started climbing fences and stuff,
and this is where it gets really really out of hand,
like the panic starts to set in. People are trying
to drag people over the fences to safety. Some of
(09:53):
the gates of the pins were opened by the cops
at that point, but it's developed into like a real dangerous.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Right, And so inside the pens there's those railings that
they're kind of like intermittently staggered in the pens, right,
So if you walk into one of these pens and
you're facing the field, you'll eventually come to a railing,
and that's a crowd barrier or a crush barrier, which
means that if a crush develops, that barrier is supposed
to stop it from going any further than the barrier.
(10:21):
So the people behind the barrier, life's gonna suck for them,
but the people in front of that barrier will be safe. Right,
it's like limiting crowd crushes. Well, the problem is one
of them was very very old, at least one, and
it gave So there's a whole crush of people who
are pressed up against this and a whole bunch of
people on the other side of it too, And now
(10:42):
one of those barriers fall and that crush of people
just basically spills into this other group of people in
the same pen and people it just fell over. It
was like a wave of people that overcame the people
who were standing on the other side of that barrier
that broke.
Speaker 3 (10:57):
Yeah, so all this time the match starts on time,
word is not again. Communication was just kind of chaotic,
and no one got word down to the pitch that hey,
maybe we should delay this game and get this under control.
And at three pm the game starts at three oh five,
(11:17):
those barriers, at least the one in Pen three, had
given away, and a human cascade starts. And this is when,
you know, the devastating stuff. We're not going to read
one thousand accounts of people getting you know, squeezed to death,
because it's pretty awful, but you know what happens in
(11:37):
a situation like that is you can't breathe because you're
so packed into one another that you can't expand your
chest out to get a breath, and you generally die
of asphyxiation or like your heart stops right.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Yeah, and this happened to a lot of people in
this We talked a lot about this phenomenon in the
Crowd episode and I think in the Black Friday episode two.
Speaker 3 (12:03):
Yeah, the Crowd one was what inspired this episode.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
Yeah, because we we just touched on it just a
little bit, right.
Speaker 3 (12:10):
I don't even know if I mean, I think if
we mentioned it. I said, I brought it up because
I had asked Kyle to write this.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
Gotcha, gotcha? Okay, But when there was like when this crowd,
this human cascade happened, people got pushed over, and you know,
there's a natural human reaction to try to get upright again,
which means that you were standing on people beneath you,
and so people got trampled. In addition to the people
who were pressed up against the other crush barriers or
against the fence. There's some really disturbing photos that were
(12:40):
taken very close up of the people pressed up against
the fence. Did you see those.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
I saw them when I was in high school and
sports illustrated, Like, I remember this vividly. I didn't go
back and revisit a lot of that because it's super upsetting.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Yeah, it really is upsiding. And there's a guy who
took a lot of His name was David Cannon, and
he was at least partially responsible for getting the police
to finally stop the game. The reason why they wanted
to stop the game so bad is because they think
that that that crush or that movement that caused the
human cascade was in response to one of Liverpool's players
(13:16):
just missing a goal, and so they're like, we need
to stop the game, right, So this guy, David Cannon,
got them to stop the game, or at least he tried.
He's one of the main photographers who was there at
the time, so his pictures are like you said, it's
very disturbing to see this because you can hear people
describe it, you can read descriptions of it, but when
(13:37):
you see the people pressed up against the fence like
they were, it really comes home how horrific this was.
Like you can kind of finally start to imagine yourself
in that position.
Speaker 3 (13:48):
Yeah, it's yeah, it's pretty bad. That's why I didn't
go back and look at three oh six. It was
a superintendent who actually got the game stopped. He went
down to the pitch and actually went to the referee.
They had a couple of minutes before signaled to the
police control box to stop, but it kept on for
two more minutes. So that's when the superintendent finally like
literally went on the field and told the referee, like,
(14:11):
you got to stop this game. This isn't because you know,
everyone thought it was just like rowdy fans, and he
was like, no, that this is not what's happening. The
match commander Duckinfield requested more cops to come. It was
called Operation Support, and no one was explaining why or
what's going on though, So once the officers and you know,
(14:32):
communications are not what they are now. Certainly it's not
an excuse, but they were not getting briefed on exactly
what was going on. So a lot of the cops
there assumed that the fans were just rowdy and we're
trying to like storm the fence, to storm the field,
and they formed a cordon on the pitch to kind
(14:54):
of keep that from happening. And again some of them
are opening gates, like they see what's going on and
are some or trying to help the fans, but other
cops are either ignoring them or like shoving people back in.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
Right or standing there facing this crowd crush in a
line according with other cops. So imagine that, like just
how surreal that would look because they didn't understand what
was going on. So eventually they managed to open some
gates which allowed the crowd crush to ease up. And
so the crowd crush was bad enough, like the after
(15:29):
effects like immediate after effects, or it just continued to
go badly. The police response, the emergency response was just
so uncoordinated that it surely I think they proved it
cost the lives of scores of people. I think in
the end, ninety five people died, seven hundred were injured.
(15:53):
Two more people died years later. So really ninety seven
people died from this crowd crush.
Speaker 3 (15:58):
Yeah, thirty seven people were teenagers, twenty seven were parents.
There was one ten year old that died. He was
very ironically, I guess, and sadly the cousin of Steven Gerard,
who was became a big star for England in their
soccer team, but I think the oldest I think that
(16:19):
was the youngest at ten and the oldest was a
sixty seven year old whose brother was playing for Liverpool.
And it's yeah again you know to read through like
each account is a little too depressing for this show.
But you did mention the two that died years later.
I think Tony Bland died four years after in nineteen
ninety three. He had brain damage up into that point
(16:40):
and then what they count as the ninety seventh victim
didn't pass away until twenty twenty one, but they said
it was due to you know, these life changing injuries
that he suffered from this.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
Yeah, I think also brain damage as well. Andrew Devine,
So there were there was like an immediate response to this,
right spite what we'll see Liverpool just taking all of
the blame for this, Liverpool fans, there was like a
public response. One of the things was Paul McCartney jumped
(17:12):
in because this is a Liverpool team and he's from Liverpool.
I don't know if you knew they're not Chuck, but he,
I guess released a charity single cover of fairy Cross
the Mercy.
Speaker 4 (17:24):
Have you heard that song?
Speaker 2 (17:25):
It's a good song.
Speaker 3 (17:27):
I didn't think it was a great but I think
it was a great act.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
Did you listen to the I didn't listen to the
eighty nine one that they released for as a charity single.
Did you listen to the original, because that's very good?
Speaker 3 (17:39):
Oh? No, I listened to the one that pertained to
the show.
Speaker 2 (17:42):
Okay, Well, at any rate, it's a good song originally,
and it was, like you said, a very cool act.
There were also tons like you can also see photos
of just the the whole entire soccer pitch covered with flowers,
just as in Memoriam. It was just there was a
there was a good public response, but ultimately public opinion
(18:05):
was much more venomous.
Speaker 3 (18:08):
Yeah, I guess that's probably a good time for a break,
and we'll come back and talk about that venom right
up for this, all right, So, right after this, the
(18:37):
police basically immediately started trying to engage in successfully as
we'll see for a while, engaged in a cover up.
They wanted to, you know, not be on the hook
for this, and the hooliganism that I talked about had
been blamed. I thought we had done an episode on hooliganism,
but I don't think we ever did, did we?
Speaker 2 (18:57):
No? Surely we talked about it in our soccer episode,
but I don't think we ever did one just on that.
Speaker 3 (19:01):
Yeah, it was on the list for a while, but
maybe we should wait in case things change again. Okay,
but that was the narrative that was fed the public
basically that match commander, and I guess we should go
ahead and talk about David Duckinfield a little bit. He's
the one that first started saying was that gate was
forced open by Liverpool fans, Like he denied even opening
(19:22):
that gate. This guy was not qualified for this job.
I think previous commanders did things like go down before
the game, like hours before, check things out, walk around,
identify choke points or potential hazards, because this had happened
a couple of times before, one time in this very stadium,
(19:43):
I think in nineteen eighty one, and so it was
top of mind or should have been, and he did
not do that. He never actually inspected the grounds beforehand,
and he kind of went missing from about noon to
two o'clock on the day, never accounted for his whereabouts.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
Yeah, he had never commanded a match at the stadium,
let alone a semi final match. Just even a regular match.
He'd never commanded it, so he had no idea what
he was doing. He was also a very arrogant person,
so he felt like he could just do it naturally.
He didn't need to familiarize himself. And he had served
(20:22):
as a rank and file patrolman or PC like ten
years before. That was the last time he'd worked a match,
and he was definitely not in charge of it. So
he was very much out of his league and like
it took him decades to finally acknowledge that. Instead, he
(20:45):
helped lead this police cover up that shifted all the
blame unfairly and untruthfully toward the fans for Liverpool and
off of the cops who were really responsible for the tragedy.
Speaker 3 (20:57):
Yeah, for sure. So we'll get to kind of what
happened in a timeline since as this goes on in
a minute, But initially the police watchdog recommended that there
was like a disciplinary case would be brought against Duckinfield.
That did not happen at the time, and he was
medically retired two years later on full pension, basically to
(21:21):
evade these discipline from this incident. The case again that
the cops built was that people were drunk. They got
there late. It was the Liverpool fans, a lot of
them didn't even have tickets and they were trying to
just force their way in. And over the years they
found out that they had gone back in. Even this
(21:43):
is how despicable it gets. Not only did they cook
up this narrative, but they went back in and cooked
the books and altered witness statements and removed comments about
that were unfavorable to the police and how things were handled,
and they torched it basically.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
Yeah, and the force was very regimented, I saw, right.
So there wasn't there wasn't going to be any descent.
There wasn't going to be any secret tip offs to
the press about what really happened by any of the
police constables, you know, under these guys charge, right, So
the top saying this is what happened. That's what everybody
on the police force was going to say, what happened.
(22:22):
And so that's what the media heard. And the British
tabloids typically have like a fairly bad reputation, and they
really showed up for it for this one. The whole
idea that the soccer fans, especially the Liverpool fans in
particular were responsible for this. Would they just beat that
(22:47):
drum incessantly? They called the fans and by extension the
victims beasts yobs, which means thugs, vile. And then The
Sun printed a front page article called The Truth I
think within a day or two after this that really
drove this home, like just how despicable the tabloids could
(23:09):
get about this stuff.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
Yeah, they said things like there were fans that were
urinating on cops, that they were looting the dead at
the time, and this was not the case. And The
Sun ended up apologizing in twenty twelve and has been
boycotted in Liverpool ever since. I still don't think they'd
sell the Sun there good, even after the apologies. But
(23:34):
this was, you know, this was the nineteen eighties and
things were different back then. The hooliganism was, you know,
much more prominent. So it was a narrative which was
easy for people to believe in England, and when they
were reading it, they you know, people were like, yeah,
this is the typical sort of anti social underclass is
(23:54):
how Kyle put it. They're trying to get in without tickets,
you know, drunk it through in the afternoon, it was
a different kind of It was a different sport back
then in a lot of ways, as far as you know,
as we'll see the kind of money that poured into
the sport in the nineteen nineties after this, certainly with
the start of the Premier League in nineteen ninety two
(24:16):
and ticket prices rising and stadiums modernizing and just big
money and big business. It just it was a lot
more just kind of small time and old school and
quaint back then, and so people were ready to accept
this narrative, you know, kind of as it was being
fed to them.
Speaker 2 (24:35):
Yeah, Britain has a classist streak running through it and
this certainly fit that idea, that supposition that lower classes
were drunk and violent, and of course they were responsible
for this, right, But so the public accepted this. The
Thatcher government obviously was totally down with this idea, and
(24:56):
that's just how it went. Like that was it, as
far as everybody was concerned. Thanks to the police reports,
thanks to the government stance, thanks to what the media
was saying. What happened was a bunch of drunk Liverpool
fans who didn't have tickets storm the gate and ninety
seven people ended up dying as a result. Shame on
(25:17):
Liverpool and its fans. That was the public opinion on
this for years.
Speaker 3 (25:23):
That's right. So in nineteen ninety we get our first
independent report. It was called the Tailor Report for Lord
Justice Taylor, and they, I mean, this was kind of
right after and they did come out blaming the police
failure to control the crowd first off, and Duckinfield specifically
(25:45):
for failing to close this tunnel. Like if they e
would have closed that tunnel and it would have fed
people to the empty pins, and that could that probably
would have avoided this whole thing, despite like having way
too many people down there. If they would have been
fed to those empty your pens, this probably wouldn't have happened. Sure,
and he made you know, safety recommendations in the final report,
(26:06):
but very key, it didn't have anything in there about
like like hey, these people were all just victims and
they had no part in sort of making this happen.
That didn't. That didn't come along until much later.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
No, for sure, that closing that tunnel too, or his
failure to close the tunnel two is even worse than
it seems because that was actually such a widely used
technique for police superintendents who were in charge of overseeing
matches over the years that one of them had his
name on. It was called the Freeman tactic. And it
(26:41):
was as simple as closing that middle tunnel and opening
the entrances to the less the less full pens. And
so that just shows you how little of a grasp
Duckinfield had on the concept of safety at a football
match that he was responsible for overseeing. He didn't even
know about the Freeman if you ask me. And like
(27:02):
rank and file cops who worked matches before knew about
the Freeman tactic. It was like that was a huge
deal in addition to all the people dying as a
result that the fact that like everyone knew that you
should do that and Duck and Field didn't is a
big deal.
Speaker 3 (27:16):
Yeah, for sure. And a year later, after the Taylor
Independent Report, the Tailor Report, these inquests are coming back
with verdicts. Accidental death is basically what they all were,
you know, decided upon, and it was very controversial. Obviously,
the victims' families are and they're the ones you know
(27:38):
who kept us alive all these years until they, you know,
finally got some measure of accountability. I guess the coroner
ruled out evidence relating to death anything after three pm.
He ruled out evidence because he said everybody was either
dead or brain dead by three point fifteen, and there
were there was like actual proof that would come out
(27:59):
later that some people survived until four pm, and a
lot of people would have survived for that forty five
minutes had they gotten emergency services in there in an
orderly manner.
Speaker 2 (28:10):
Right Yeah, those are the people I was talking about earlier.
So that coroner essentially was just basically going along with
the sentiment, the public sentiment that these people surely it
wasn't the police who were responsible, right Yeah. In addition
though to being disorganized, they were also like really cruel
to the families, And this stuff came out in these reports,
(28:32):
including the Hip report in the trials that like, if
you were a victim family member, you were sent to
a gym, a nearby gym that had been turned into
a morgue, and the first thing that you encountered was
standing out waiting outside in the cold before they led
you in and handed you a stack of polaroids of
(28:53):
the victim's dead bodies.
Speaker 3 (28:55):
Right yeah, I mean they had to look through those
who identify their own. It was pretty brutal.
Speaker 2 (29:01):
But it wasn't even like are you looking for a child?
Are you looking for a man? And they were sorted.
It was like, here's the stack of polaroids, look through
hi until you find your loved one. The parents of
the children who died, they weren't allowed to hold or
kiss them because they were told that they were property
of the coroner. And the coroner himself seems to have
been on the cover up to some degree, tangentially, because
(29:25):
he ordered that all of the deceased, including the children,
have their blood drawn to be tested for alcohol content
to support this police narrative. Well, what turned out, what
he did inadvertently was show that alcohol was not a
factor in this really, Like there were very few drunk people,
and the ones that were drunk weren't all that drunk.
Speaker 3 (29:46):
Yeah, I mean, in a weird way, it's good that
he did that, you know.
Speaker 4 (29:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
So, like you said, the families of the victims organized
and tried to keep this thing alive and you know,
keep the public from solidifying their about what had happened,
and they managed to get a private prosecution I guess
laid or charged against the police for this for the incident.
Didn't know you could do that. Apparently you can still
(30:13):
in the UK, America some other places. But a private
group of people can get a court to prosecute people,
and that's what they did. And this found that duck
and Field, they couldn't reach a verdict on him, whether
he was criminally responsible or not. One of his deputies
was acquitted and the judge in this case said, that's it.
(30:33):
Duck and Field will never face another a retrial like
this is it. He's not responsible, even though we failed
to reach a verdict, which is a weird thing to do.
But that happened in two thousand.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
Yeah, charges against Sheffield the actual football club that wasn't
even playing that day, but he played in that stadium
Sheffield Wednesday, and the Sheffield City Council and the safety
engineers the Eastwoods were ruled out. And this was I
think years earlier, so they were already off the hook.
So that was all in two thousand. Twelve years later,
(31:06):
in twenty twelve, there was another report that the Hip Report,
the Hillsboro Independent Panel, and that brought about some new
inquests more sort of digging into this thing about like
what happened with the police, And this is the one
that really started to kind of turn the tide as
far as the public goes. And one of the reasons
(31:27):
it happened was because MP Andy Burnham was at a
twenty year memorial service and was just lambasted by the
crowd people chanting justice for the ninety six. Really had
a hard time at that event. So he's the one
that was like, let's open this back up four hundred
and fifty thousand pages of information, and this is when
(31:50):
they really kind of started to make things right.
Speaker 2 (31:53):
Yeah, that panel apparently kept like releasing information piecemeal and
the press is kept reporting on it, and very quickly
the public was like, oh wait, we've been wrong. It
wasn't these drunken Liverpool fans. They were mistreated. The families
of the victims were mistreated, survivors were mistreated. It was
actually these cops, and the cops had lied to essentially
(32:14):
cover up their responsibility. Like the public opinion just completely shifted,
and so that hip report led to new inquests, and
the inquests found that the ninety six victims and later
on the ninety seventh victim were all unlawfully killed. So
it wasn't accidental anymore. Like the first inquest found they
(32:37):
were unlawfully killed, which meant someone is criminally accountable for
their deaths, right, And this inquest said go figure it out,
like this is our we're saying, we're recommending that somebody
is responsible for this.
Speaker 3 (32:51):
Yeah. It also found that forty one I was looking
for the number earlier, but forty one of the ninety
six who died, they said, quote had potential to survive
if the you know, rescue had been a little more organized,
because I don't think we said the first ambulance arrived
on the scene at three sixteen, and even when the
ambulances had been called, they didn't know the severity of
(33:13):
the situation because they I think one cop called for
like a big, you know, mass of ambulances to come,
but it wasn't described what was happening, so they refused
that initial. The medical services refused that initial like huge
rush of ambulances and just sent like some They also
didn't set up patriage on the field like you know,
(33:33):
we'll get to that in a little more detail. But
forty one of the ninety six would have survived, they determined,
which is just a brutal number.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
Yeah, in twenty nineteen, after all this stuff had come out,
public opinion changed, Duckingfield was dragged back into court. Remember
that one judge had been like, he can't face a retrial. Well,
they were like, well, circumstances have changed enough now that
he's definitely going to be tried again. And he was
(34:01):
found not guilty of gross negligence manslaughter. And then they
also heard evidence about the altering of the police reports
to make it favorable for the cops and make it
unfavorable for the Liverpool fans, and those guys got off too.
So now we have a place where the inquest, the
government inquest, is saying these people are unlawfully killed, so
(34:24):
someone's criminally responsible, and the courts are saying the people
who are responsible are not criminally responsible, So nobody is
liable anymore. Nobody's responsible officially.
Speaker 3 (34:35):
Yeah. And then the final well, who knows it's a
final report because they seem to still be happening. But
last year, in twenty twenty five, an Independent Office for
Police Conduct report came out and basically reiterated that nobody
was going to be held like, actually held responsible. You know,
(34:56):
they it wasn't as cold hearted as it sounds, they
were basically saying like, hey, this is thirty six years later.
All twelve of these officers are either have either passed
on or have long since retired. And I got the
sense it was like, can we can we put this
all behind us now and not throw these old cops
(35:16):
in jail.
Speaker 2 (35:18):
Essentially, But yeah, I think the families were like, well,
they're still responsible even though they're old. And the reason
that they got old because you took fourteen years to
conduct this investigation.
Speaker 3 (35:27):
Yeah for sure, let's take a break.
Speaker 2 (35:29):
Chuck, and we'll come back and finish up.
Speaker 4 (35:31):
Huh. Yeah, let's do it, okay, Chuck.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
So not just the hip report, but a bunch of
different reports basically showed quite clearly that the police response,
the emergency response was just terrible. And you talked a
lot about what the I guess the cluster with the ambulances,
but the police as well were essentially disorganized about its
disorganized as a group of police can be. And the
(36:15):
reason why is because again David Duckinfield was just out
of his depth through and through even though he was
commanding the match. And I said that he was a
rather arrogant type and he was. But in twenty fifteen,
for the first time in decades, twenty five plus years,
(36:35):
as these reports started coming out and public opinion changed,
when he was tried, eventually he admitted. After seven days
of intense grilling on the stand, he finally basically broke
down and admitted like, yes, he was responsible for the
death of those ninety six people because the ninety seventh
(36:55):
hadn't died yet, and that he froze under pressure. This
is a complete reversal of what he'd been saying the
whole time, Chuck like he'd been saying it was the
Liverpool fans. They were drunk. They were drunk. These guys
have been saying it for decades. Now, all of a sudden,
the guy in charge says, no, I failed and people
died because I was not qualified to command that match.
Speaker 3 (37:15):
Yeah. You know, you hear something like that as a
family member of a victim, and it's I don't know
how that feels, actually, I don't know if that would
provide some solace to finally hear the truth, yeah, or
if it just like re angers you all over again
after all these years.
Speaker 2 (37:29):
Probably both.
Speaker 3 (37:30):
Yeah, I'm sure there's a lot of mixed emotion about it,
but at the very least that finally happened. I mean,
there is something about somebody finally admitting something like and
not just continuing to gaslight the world and the victims themselves,
So I guess that is something. It really changed stadium
safety and security after this, the Taylor Report. They basically said, hey,
(37:54):
no more of these standing room only things. You have
to have seats for everybody that's in there. I think
it was all the clubs in the top two divisions
in nineteen ninety four had to move to that, and
then they established the Ground Sports Ground Safety Authority after that,
you know, to oversee like all of these football stadiums
(38:16):
over there.
Speaker 4 (38:17):
Right.
Speaker 2 (38:17):
Yeah, this was a major turning point, not just in
safety at football matches, but in the game of football
itself because this happened to coincide with England making it
into the semi finals in the World Cup in nineteen
ninety and you know a lot of people who had
been former football fans were now caught up in the
spirit again. So that brought a lot of people back
to being fans of pro football. Those upgrades that the
(38:43):
clubs and the stadiums were required to undertake meant that
they needed to up ticket prices, higher ticket prices, like
you said, kind of change the social strata of fans.
It got more expensive, it got more business like soccer
changed almost directly as a result of the Hillsborough tragedy.
Speaker 3 (39:01):
Yeah, and that, you know, when the Premier League came
on in ninety two, like that was that was a
real game changer. Like the amount of money that is
spent in the Premier League on players, on the teams,
on I think there's the and I'll probably get some
of this wrong because I don't call the Premier League,
but my good friends do all of them almost And
(39:22):
they were talking about the you know, you get relegated
if you don't I guess when, or I guess if
you're in the bottom of whatever category and you don't
make that you don't win that game to stay in
the Premier League, you get relegated down to the lower league.
And so that game to see who gets relegated and
who doesn't is called the most expensive game in sports
(39:44):
or something like that, just because of like all the
money that comes with or that you miss out on
with being relegated or that comes with staying in the
Premier League.
Speaker 2 (39:53):
Yeah, these guys get paid like thousands and thousands of
pounds a year to play, some of them way more
than that.
Speaker 3 (40:00):
That even the first joke of the episode.
Speaker 2 (40:03):
Let's talk about Keir Starmer because he is under fire
right now. That family or the organization of victims Families,
they haven't gone away. They organized and they're still very
vocal and one of the things that they have been
doing is putting pressure on Kere Starmer and his labor
government because he made a direct promise that he would
see through the Hillsborough Law, which would it was pretty
(40:27):
important legislation, or it would be if they get it
passed through.
Speaker 3 (40:31):
Yeah. I think the whole point, it seems to be
of the Hillsborough Law would be to enforce and it's
weird that you have the law to do this, but
to enforce truth when cops are dealing with something like
this and basically like almost like a whistleblower thing like hey,
you can come out and tell the truth, Like you
(40:51):
don't like you're obliged to tell the truth. You don't
have to go along with this narrative that gets passed
down and that loyalty that you were kind of talking
about earlier on I don't I'm that didn't like really
dig into the law. I don't know if they're like
protections or anything involved, but that law was is hasn't
been passed yet, which is really frustrating.
Speaker 2 (41:12):
Right, Yeah, not just cops too, but like any public
official has to tell the truth and when it pertains
to their work, which actually it is sad that you
would need to make a law, but that would be
revolutionary to have a law like that in any country,
you know.
Speaker 3 (41:27):
Yeah. And I think the hang up maybe or one
of the hang ups is I five, And we did
a pretty good episode on that at one point that
I think Kyle helped us with that one too. But
unless I'm reading this wrong, it seems like I five
is hanging it up because they're like, hey, listen, like
we deal in lies and subterfuge, like that's our bag,
(41:47):
so we can't be included in this.
Speaker 4 (41:49):
That is our bag. Baby, That's right.
Speaker 3 (41:52):
I missed it. I missed the baby.
Speaker 2 (41:56):
You got anything else?
Speaker 3 (41:57):
I got nothing else, just to an awful tragedy, like
I said. I remember this was right after spring break
my senior year. I came home and I had been
a regular Sports Illustrated subscriber since I was like nine
years old and this was I think the cover issue
even and that's where I saw those brutal pictures. If
(42:18):
you're into a it's not like super hard to watch
other than you know, it's about the tragedy, but they
don't show like truly truly awful things. There's that twelve
minute documentary from The Guardian that you sent that really
encapsulates it, although there are some body bags and stuff
like that, so I guess there should be a trigger
warning there, Yeah, for sure, But thankfully there weren't. Like,
(42:41):
you know, I didn't see any actual video footage of
the fences and the people, like, I don't know if
that exists.
Speaker 2 (42:49):
Yeah, I don't. Yeah, I don't know either. The photographs
definitely do. I'd be surprised if there wasn't any footage, So, you.
Speaker 3 (42:54):
Know, yeah, I wonder if that photographer won an award
for that work he did.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
You should have, especially if he was one of the
people helping, because you know, so many fans helped, you know,
try to render aid to the people on the field.
One thing we probably should mention that that we didn't
is that in twenty twelve, the United Kingdom government, through
Prime Minister David Cameron at the time, apologized to the
(43:23):
victim's families for the double injustice of the loss of
life and the blame that was put on Liverpool fans.
So at least they had that kernel of something. Yeah, Solace,
maybe Salace, thank you a quantum of it.
Speaker 3 (43:37):
If you want to know more, you're just throwing around
British pop culture references. Who knew that James Bond and
Austin Powers were going to make an appearance.
Speaker 2 (43:44):
I'm going to start on my own sitcom called Suddenly
Angle File, but it's gonna be spelled like that. I
just Mangled Anglo file.
Speaker 3 (43:52):
Yeah, or black Adder, that's another good title.
Speaker 2 (43:55):
Sure, since Chuck made a joke about Blackadder has foretold
in two thousand and eight, it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 3 (44:04):
I'm going to call this. I screwed up on that
Van Go episode about the movie. Hey, guys, just finished
the Visa Bango episode. Want to let you know the
movie with Willem Dafoe is called at Eternity's Gate. This
is something I remember now but I forgot at the time.
You mustn't have seen it. But we're aware of it.
More importantly, you must see Loving Vincent, and I think
(44:25):
that's what I said.
Speaker 4 (44:26):
It was called.
Speaker 3 (44:27):
That's the movie that's animated using sixty five thousand paintings
done in the style of Ago by one hundred Polish painters.
Speaker 2 (44:33):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (44:34):
It's visually amazing and incredibly well done. And the soundtrack
includes the song from Don McClean. I think we talked
about it in the episode of Vincent Storry Storry Night
beautifully compliments the movie highly recommended. My wife and are
huge fans of the show. Have been listening to every
episode since almost the beginning. Keep up the amazing work
(44:54):
and don't let those naysayers who complain about your sidebars.
That's one of the things we enjoy most. And that
is from Brian and Alexis in Bethlehem, PA.
Speaker 2 (45:04):
Nice Thanks Brian and Alexis. We appreciate that, Chuck. Since
you stepped up and took a correction, I feel like
I should admit to one. Okay, in are Lamon's short stuff,
you mean Lamon, that's part of it. The bigger part
is that I said Greece is an island. I even
went back and double checked, and everybody's right. It is
(45:26):
not an island at all.
Speaker 3 (45:28):
I didn't catch you saying that.
Speaker 2 (45:29):
So it's like Germany being landlocked. Now my geography skills
are starting to match up with my math skills.
Speaker 3 (45:36):
I wish I would have caught that, because I remember
very distinctly that you could take a train there.
Speaker 2 (45:41):
Well, in the episode, you said, yeah, yeah, it sure
is an island. I swear to God it's an island.
Speaker 4 (45:46):
Josh, that's right.
Speaker 3 (45:47):
I doubled down verbatim.
Speaker 2 (45:50):
All right, Well, thanks to Brian and Alexis. And if
you want to be like Brian and Alexis, you can
get in touch with this too via email at Stuff.
Speaker 1 (45:59):
Podcast That I Heard, Stuff You Should Know is a
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows. H
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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